


Slow Burn

by SpaceNugget11



Series: Late Bloom, Summer Fields [1]
Category: Naruto
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Friendship, Friendship/Love, Gen, Humor, I'm actually not sure what this is, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Romance, Romance if you squint, Slow Burn, banging without actually banging, i guess?, would people get mad if i just tag it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-02
Updated: 2020-06-02
Packaged: 2021-03-03 22:06:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,028
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24502840
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SpaceNugget11/pseuds/SpaceNugget11
Summary: Team 7's terrible twosome are off on a "super top secret mission" (or so says Kakashi). Bad weather reports, bad habits, and flashbacks are abound, but all Sakura had wanted was her ice cream.
Relationships: Haruno Sakura & Hatake Kakashi, Haruno Sakura/Hatake Kakashi
Series: Late Bloom, Summer Fields [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1813480
Comments: 6
Kudos: 33





	Slow Burn

**Author's Note:**

> Formerly: "Just Between You and Me" because that title never sat right with me.

The rain had come on suddenly. There had been no mention of it in the mission brief, but Sakura supposed that was the Weather Department for you. Last year they had suggested she pack lightly for Ame since it’d be the dry season, and because she had listened, she spent two weeks in her summer clothes mucking through the worst flooding the country had seen in decades. The whole mishap had been fourteen weeks of mud-caked misery, but no surprise there. It _was_ the Weather Department, after all. Just look at that time she had headed to Kumo.

Weather had warned a powerful polar vortex would strike the region. "Sub-zero temperatures are imminent," the little nerds had said while staring at their clipboards. As these things went, the skies had remained clear, temperatures hadn’t drop below 50, and Sakura had been stuck lugging a back-breaking eighty pounds of gear up the country’s cloud-covered peaks. Three days in and she had been _this_ close to chucking that pack off into the abyss.

So, when Sakura felt the drop of water on her nose that afternoon, she looked up and eyed the ceiling of clouds with practiced resignation.

Kakashi paused beside her and followed her gaze up, lifting a hand to shade his eyes. “Oh? The weather department didn’t mention any rain...”

“That’s because your weather department is about as useful as a box of wet matches,” Sakura said as she cast her attention about for a place to set up shelter. She could feel the water droplets hitting her face with increased frequency; they’d be caught in a storm soon.

“ _My_ weather department?” Her old teacher sounded mildly aghast by the association. Kakashi had not only been on that mission to Kumo with Sakura, he was the one who had convinced her discus-throwing eighty pounds of standard-issue gear off the mountainside—while satisfying in the moment—wouldn’t endear her to the Equipment and Weapons Department (you didn’t want to be on the shit list of the guys in charge of your field tackle). So they had stuck it out like good shinobi were supposed to, struggling against the weight of their supplies an Kumo’s lung-crushing altitude. It sufficed to say, nobody liked the guys in Weather.

“You’re the Hokage,” Sakura said, trying to skewer him on his title. “You sign-off on their budget. “

“Do I?” Kakashi asked. The skies rumbled, warning of thunder.

“You do,” she said, taking another stab. “Shikamaru told me you doubled Weather’s budget this quarter. Meanwhile, the hospital is still understaffed. Do you know how many times you’ve rejected my budget appeal?” She saved him from his own ignorance. “Twenty-seven.”

“Shikamaru puts a lot of papers in front of me. Many, many papers. Sometimes right after I wake up from my naps,” he said, hoping it would do as a justification for being bad at his job.

“That’s not a justification for being bad at your job, Kakashi-sensei.”

“No, no, of course not,” he said.

“How about here?” Sakura suddenly stopped, motioning at a low hanging bough with a deep bend in its center. “If we throw a tarp over it, it should do.” 

Kakashi’s perfect recall remembered a hollow tree on its side five miles back from the direction they had come. It had been about the size of a small house with room for a fire as well. If this storm got bad, the hollow would be the better bet. Summer hadn’t ended long ago, but they were high in the mountains and temperatures in early Autumn were unpredictable at this altitude. 

“Seems prime,” he said, agreeing with her. Shelter was important, but it was his priority to get out Sakura’s crosshairs. She and his biggest dog, Bull, were a lot alike in that way: both of them threw their weight around and once they bit down, it’d took a crow bar to pry them loose . The only difference was that while Bull still listened to Kakashi, Sakura had outgrown that trait a long time ago.

By the time they got the tarp out of Sakura’s pack and wrangled it open, the rain began in annoying earnest, and soon their sopping clothes dropped on their frames like ill-fitting skins. Neither of them had their traveling cloaks because the Weather Department had guaranteed, “Humidity the whole way through. You’ll be sweating through your underwear.” Kakashi staked the last corner of the tarp into the mushy earth as the mud squelched between his toes and the water sluiced past the corner of his eyes—had he really approved of doubling Weather’s budget this quarter? He’d have to check up on that once they got back. 

They crouched into the makeshift tent as the storm grew rowdier, the tarp rasping as they brushed up against it while looking for a place to sit that wasn’t puddled with water. Sakura perched herself upon a small flat stone, while the best Kakashi’s efforts produced was a patch of wet moss. As water seeped through the seat of his pants, he made the executive decision then and there he would decommission the Weather Department into oblivion as soon as they got back.

They sat shoulder to shoulder with their legs to their chest, miserable and wet. Kakashi’s hands rested on his knees, while Sakura’s were busy wringing her hair dry. He noted they could see their breathes. 

“You’ve grown out your hair,” he observed, trying to make small talk. Not that he needed to—the rain hitting plastic was plenty loud to fill the silence.

Sakura gave a short, “Yeah,” and the rain fell between them like dropped curtain.

She still wasn’t really sure how she got here.

“Here” being this two-man mission with her weirdo teacher. She was supposed to be on vacation this week and had a checklist of very important things to do, like buying more hair conditioner and shoveling herself with as much ice cream as she could until she couldn’t see straight. Then, Kakashi had come knocking, disarmed her with pleasantries before throwing a travel pack into her hands, and dragging her out onto in to the bush for what he had termed to be “super top secret mission.”

She had demanded why it had to be _her_ specifically.

“The choice was that I either brought along a high-level medic or an entire battalion of ANBU bodyguards. Seriously, no one seems to understand the meaning of ‘super top secret’ now days,” he had lamented. So it goes. 

It had been a while since her last mission with her teacher—actually, it had been a while period since she had last seen him. He had been busy being a doddering Hokage, and she had been busy, well, not doddering.

Eventually, Sakura grew bored of listening to water and asked him, “Did you find a plant-sitter for Mr. Ukki 2?”

“Hmm?” Kakashi broke away from the engrossing endeavor of staring at the black stain on the tarp above him.

“Did you find a plant-sitter—” She paused as she grit her chattering teeth. “A plant-sitter. For Mr. Ukki 2. Did you find one? Remember when you killed Mr. Ukki 1? Naruto was pretty bummed about that.”

“Ah, you mean when I ended up in the hospital for six weeks after saving the two of you from that Kekkei Genki?”

“Yeah,” her jaw shuddered over the word.

“I think I broke every single bone in my body that time,” Kakashi recalled. 

“Naruto was pretty bummed about Mr. Ukki 1. He told me he bought it with his first ever paycheck. I think he spent a really long time picking out Mr. Ukki 2, too.”

“I had one of my attendants take care of Mr. Ukki 2.”

“That seems like an abuse of power.”

“Probably,” he agreed.

The staccato in Sakura’s teeth worsened—she didn’t even try to hold it back. She wrapped herself around her knees, her shoulders shaking from the cold. “Kakashi-sensei,” she bit out.

“I know,” he assured her. Beside her, Kakashi looked out the opening their makeshift tent, his brows furrowing as his gray eyes considered the downpour outside. The wind was picking up, and the tarp struggled to flap free of the stakes. They would hold, Kakashi knew, because he had put them down. The bigger concern was the dropping temperatures. He slipped a hand into his pocket, his fingers fidgeting with the little metal box that was always there as the cogs in his brain turned and turned.

[xxx]

Sakura knew about the little metal box in Kakashi’s pocket, and she guessed she was the only one on Team 7 that did so; neither of the two boys had ever mentioned it. That wasn’t much of a surprise, though. Out of Kakashi’s little Trio of Terrors, Sakura would be the first one he’d grab if there was ever any trouble. She had lost count of the amount of times her teacher had blitzed her to the ground or yanked her into the trees to avoid a surprise kunai to the head or some other imminent death. As a kid, Sakura had gotten her face smashed against Kakashi’s vest enough times for her suspicions to take root. Of course, she had never caught him red-handed—the man was ex-ANBU after all.

A few times she knew she almost had him, but his hands were always a little faster; by the time she had pounced upon him, all she ever found was her teacher smiling beneath his mask, refusing to give ground despite the insistent press of her stare, the air around him clear.

To this day, she still didn’t know how he did it. 

So, for a long time, Kakashi floated between her fingers, and her suspicions remained nothing more than a little seed, sitting dormant for so long she had almost forgotten about it—until that unbearably hot summer night when it had suddenly, raucously, bloomed in her chest.

[xxx] 

“Sakura. Sakura, wake-up.”

Sakura’s lids creaked open, and Kakashi’s worried eyes came into view. His breath trailed like white smoke from his mask as he spoke. She looked about sluggishly, vaguely registering they were still beneath the tarp. She wondered if it was still raining. Alarm bells rang in the far back of her mind.

With some heroic effort, her inner-medic managed to mumble out, “Hypothermia.”

Kakashi nodded and said a bunch of things that went over her head. She sleepily watched as he shucked off his standard issue vest and yanked down his mask, gray eyes steady on her as his mouth moved around words like “body heat” and “five miles back.” Seeing her teacher’s bare face was kind of weird, but she was too punch drunk to muster any real enthusiasm over it. Plus, she had seen all of it before. Everything.

She felt the utility belt around her waist fall away. Instinctively, she tried to hold it in place, but someone brushed her hands aside.

“Sakura,” Kakashi said, lightly patting her cheeks to try and bring her back. 

Right, her name. With his mask in the way, usually the most people had to work with were Kakashi's eyebrows; now she could see her teacher’s mouth pressed into a grim line and his brows knitted together, his face unfamiliar and strange in its vivid emotions, held out for the entire world to see. She strained against her muddled thoughts, trying with brute willpower to press her consciousness forward. 

In a tenuous moment of clarity, she heard him say, “Sakura, your dress.” 

Her dress.

She brought her heavy sandbag arm, up to her neck to comply, hands shaking terribly from the cold and so numb she couldn’t even feel her fingers as she slipped them beneath the flap at her collar. She tugged at it with a grunt of effort and the buttons beneath snapped free.

That was just about all she had left in her, however, and her lids fell close as she let herself slip back into the darkness.

[xxx]

In hindsight, the trap should have been glaringly obvious, and Naruto maybe shouldn’t have taken the free drink while they were in foreign territory. But people also gave Uzumaki Naruto, Hero of the Leaf, Savior of the World, free shit everywhere they went. How were they supposed to know this time the beer was laced? That a rag-tag bunch of stray shinobi of little renown were actually the last remaining keepers of a fearsome, yet long-forgotten Kei Kei Genkai that could manipulate the human body? And who could have foreseen that Kakashi would swoop in to take the hit from the fearsome, yet long-forgotten Kei Kei Genkai and get utterly maimed in his students’ stead?

Okay, so maybe the last one hadn’t exactly been a shocker. To be honest, it had been embarrassing for Naruto and Sakura to realize that, at the end of the day, they-- who each had a hand in delivering the world from multiple Apocalypses--were still the same snot-nosed kids that needed their old sensei to wipe their asses.

Fortunately, Naruto had snapped back to form _just_ in the nick of time to level their enemies with his pet demon fox, and Sakura had been there to patch together the very worst of their broken teacher with her medical jutsu.

Still, she could only do so much, and Kakashi had been put on leave for weeks. It should have been months, but after the hospital staff caught him attempting to escape through the window for the tenth time, Tsunade had called him an insufferable brat, threw him a bottle of painkillers, and sent him home on the absolutely non-negotiable condition he’d take house calls.

As a result, that hot hazy August evening had found Sakura picking the lock on the front door to her teacher’s apartment because Tsunade had told her to make sure he hadn’t goofed up and overdosed on the painkillers, and Kakashi hadn’t answered despite her insistent pounding. When Sakura had finally jimmied the door open, she was already lobbing complaints before she had made it through the threshold.

Instead of her teacher’s usual blasé existence, however, she had been met by a blast of oppressive heat and resounding silence. “Kakashi-sensei?” She had called out, wiping away a dribble of sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand, suddenly uncertain. 

The small-box apartment had turned into a furnace in the summer heat, yet the windows were shut and the electric fan sat quietly on the desk, never turned-on. Beyond the large window over the bed, the bloated sun had hung low and red in the sky, sinking slowly behind the sleeping mountains, casting long, strange shadows across the floorboards. It would be completely dark in less than an hour.

She had found her teacher a crumpled mess beneath his covers despite the torrid heat, drenched in sweat with his eyes screwed shut. His skin had felt worryingly hot to the touch, but the fact that he hadn’t even stirred under her hand had been a greater cause of concern.

She almost hadn’t recognize Kakashi for his bare face, but the temptation to rejoice in the realization of her childhood ambitions to unmask him had been overshadowed by the bottle of painkillers on the shelf above him—the one that Tsunade had given him three days prior with his discharge— the one that Tsunade had impressed, _impressed_ upon him to take no more of than two pills from per day, and if and _only if_ it got so bad he’d rather walk through the gates of hell than suffer another second on this mortal coil—the one, when Sakura twisted open to check its contents, that had turned out to be half-empty.

[xxx]

Kakashi let out a low curse as Sakura remained unresponsive. The rain had grown to a deafening roar, and the plastic overhead did nothing against the water creeping up through the soil below. At this rate, they’d be up to their necks in mud. Kakashi summoned four of his ninken, his hands so numb he couldn’t even feel his canine breaking the skin of his thumb to draw blood.

“Kakashi,” Pakkun greeted from the top of Akino’s head. A whine escaped the pug as he furiously shook himself. “It’s cold.”

“Sorry guys,” he apologized, his chattering teeth almost biting his tongue. He pulled his top over his head and let it fall to the ground in a wet slop, grimacing as great quakes rocked his body—he thought had been cold before. “Hate to do this you, but situation’s not great.”

Akino, always the smartest of the bunch, coolly took stock of the situation from behind his sunglasses. “You need some extra body heat?” He deduced. 

Kakashi nodded. Bull would have been the ideal choice for the job, but space beneath the tarp was too cramped to accommodate the 200 pound Pitbull.

Slipping off Akino’s head, Pakkun gingerly made his way to Sakura’s side, his nose twitching. A low whine escaped the pug. “Kakashi, your female doesn’t smell like she’s doing too well.”

"She’s going to be okay,” he replied curtly; he was the Sixth Hokage, and he’d be damned if he lost a subordinate to a little bad weather. He began the very undesirable process of shucking off Sakura’s dress. There was no longer any room in the situation for courtesy or modesty, though he couldn’t help but spare a moment to be grateful for her practicality in wearing a sports bra and spandex underneath.

At 24, Haruno Sakura was an adult by society’s standards with a growing reputation that would one day become the stuff of legends, but by Kakashi’s standards, she was still just his favorite kid-student with a sharp mind and a cheeky smile. No matter how clinical he tried being about it, undressing her was a little weird.

And okay, maybe she had experienced a meteoric rise in popularity amongst the village males ever since puberty finally got around to adding its finishing touches on her, and maybe Kakashi had the habit of chucking his book at the bozos who spoke crudely of her within earshot, but he would’ve done the same for Naruto or Sasuke if they had been girls. Probably.

Laying out his shirt over the mud, Kakashi tiredly flopped down onto it and dragged Sakura into his lap, his breath hitching sharply in his throat as he pressed her coldness to himself; he needed to bear it, for both their sakes. He inhaled deeply, trying to steady his shaking—it didn’t work.

“C’mon boys,” Kakashi muttered, and his hounds crowded around them, Pakkun deciding the best seat in the house would be atop Sakura’s belly.

Kakashi hadn’t expected immediate results, but concern began to gnaw at him when minutes passed and Sakura remained listless in his arms, and was it just him or were her lips turning blue?

Rin’s dead face suddenly appeared before him, and he beat it back into the depths of his mind.

Why was he thinking about that now? He was losing it—Sakura just was cold, not dying, he told himself, chiding his imagination for being so dramatic while he tightened his hold around her.

[xxx]

Forcibly extracting poison from the human body required three things: (1) god-tiered chakra control, (2) a bowl of water, and (3) an assistant to hold the screaming patient down. Sakura had the first and second, but not the third when she had found Kakashi in his apartment with enough opioids in his system to take down an elephant. It had been too late to run out to grab help since she didn’t know how much longer her teacher had before his heart gave out, so she had to make do with what she had. 

It had been a brutal procedure in many ways.

Kakashi had erupted as soon as she had passed the water into his body, and half-delirious from pain, he had fought her tooth and nail every inch of the way. Trying to split her focus between using her super-strength to pin down his arching frame while simultaneously carrying out osmosis across every individual cell wall had been nearly impossible—nearly. Sakura wasn’t a legend in the making for nothing. Surprisingly, however, that hadn’t been the hardest part.

It’s never a pleasant experience to hear a grown man screaming, but the sound cut unexpectedly deep when it came from the man who had played the role of her protector for the past seven years. Her time as a medical shinobi had left Sakura hardened to patients’ sufferings, but even she had to blink back her tears and grit her teeth against the twist of her heart when Kakashi had grabbed her wrist and begged her to stop.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” kept spilling from her lips, but Sakura hadn’t stopped, and neither had Kakashi’s pleas.

They both endured it for three hours.

When she had finally finished, Sakura ran down to the corner store for a bag of ice to bring down Kakashi’s fever, and by the time she had returned to the room, night had fallen and the moon had risen, silver light spilling through the window she’d left open.

The lights were off, but by the pale dint of the moon, Sakura saw her teacher’s dim figure sitting at the edge of the bed, his back hunched and his head hanging low. She had turned the desk fan on before leaving, and the little machine persisted in its lonely vigilance against the oppressive heat, the only sound in the otherwise quiet room. Once again, uncertainty gripped her.

“Kakashi-sensei?” She tried, holding the bag of ice so close to her chest its melt began to seep into the front of her top.

He grunted an answer, and before Sakura could press for more, she saw a glint of metal in his hand, the click of flint igniting, and suddenly a small, crisp flame sprung before his face. He cupped a hand behind it and drew it close to the white cigarette hanging from his mouth, the glow spilling against parts of his face and sending others plunging into shadows.

Maybe it had been because she’d just dragged him back from the edge of the void, or the unsteady light across his features, or the absence his mask, but Sakura couldn’t recognized the tired and defeated man before her.

And just as quickly, he capped the flame, his face vanished from the light, leaving behind only the glowing red eye of the lit cigarette. The ember flared bright for a moment, and then Sakura heard him exhale, the gray smoke rushing out between his lips before it wafted up towards the ceiling, disappearing into the moonlight.

There it was— the bloom.

[xxx]

Sakura smelled the wet fur before anything else. Then, came the realization it was hard to breathe. She muzzily opened an eye and immediately discovered the source of her problem when Bull greeted her with a baritone woof, splayed over her like the 200 pound slobbering blanket he never should dhave been. Wrenching an arm free from beneath the folds of his body, Sakura absentmindedly patted his ponderously large head as she tried to piece together the situation.

Her dress was laid out to dry by the fire crackling a few feet away, the flames throwing light and shadows against a wall made of moss and bark. From what she could gather, it seemed they were in a felled tree. She looked up and saw only darkness, the glow of the fire unable to reach the ceiling. This place must have been the size of a small house.

As the rest of her scattered senses slowly fell in line, she heard the wind howling just outside and the rain patter outside against the tree, smelled the wood smoke from the fire and rich forest loam, and further beneath all of that, that familiar acrid scent of tobacco.

“Sakura?” Kakashi called from somewhere beyond her line of sight.

“Yeah,” she croaked.

By the time her teacher happened upon her, Sakura had freed her other arm from beneath Bull and was drowsily playing with the dog’s ears-- Kakashi’s resident killing machine had been reduced to silly putty in the girl’s hands. 

“Where are we?” She asked. 

“In a tree,” he replied, bending over to place the back of his hand against her cheek to take her temperature. His basic medical training expertise decided it was a good sign that she no longer felt like a human icicle.

“I figured that part out. I mean, where exactly are we?”

“Five miles south of our original location, as the crow flies.”

“Oh. The mission?”

“It’s on pause until this storm passes, by the order of the Sixth Hokage,” Kakashi declared and eased himself down beside her, suddenly exhausted. It felt as if the years had been scraped off of him, leaving behind nothing but that excruciating ache. His hand went into his pocket, fingers toying with the little silver box, imagining the ember and flames that could burn it all away.

“Pretty sure your Weather Department said we would be sweating through our underwear,” his student wryly pointed out. 

“I’m shutting that thing down as soon as we get back,” he said with a look that used to strike terror in the hearts of his enemies. Now, it just incited a laugh from a young woman. It seemed he was losing his touch.

“You’ll probably end up accidentally increasing their budget instead.”

He gave it some thought. “That’s not unlikely.”

“Kakashi-sensei?”

“Hmm?” He offered distractedly, busy trying to rub the tiredness from his eyes. 

“You know,” She paused.

“I know?” Kakashi pressed.

“You know, you can just smoke, right? I mean, I’ve known about it for a while now.”

It took her teacher some time to puzzle out what she meant. When it all finally clicked in place, he couldn’t help but give a small chuckle as he closed his fingers around his mask and dragged it down to his neck, revealing a smile and that little mole on his chin.

“Right,” he said, and pulled a pack from his vest.

Tapping out a new light, he held the fresh cigarette between his teeth as his hands dug around his pockets for his little silver lighter. When he found it, he flipped it open and rolled the flint. A spark and the flame sprung up, and Kakashi held it close with his eyes half-lidded, tilting his head to let the end of cigarette touch the flame, like he had all those nights ago.

Sakura thought he still looked tired, though less defeated.

Then, with a flick of his wrists, the show was over, the flame had disappeared beneath the cap, and all that was left was a that red eye burning at the end.

Kakashi inhaled for what felt like an eternity. Finally, he pulled the cigarette away, and said, “Sakura.” Smoke curled out of his mouth as he said her name.

“Hmm?” She asked.

“How long are you going to stare at my face for?”

“What? Ew, gross! I am _not_ staring at your face!”

“Who’s better looking? Me or Sasuke?” He continued despite her obvious embarrassment, or rather, because of it.

“ _Kakashi-sensei_ ,” Sakura shrilled. Bull yelped in pain as she accidently crushed his ears in her grip. “Oh no, I’m so sorry, boy.”

Kakashi laughed and Sakura was glad it was too dark for him to see the blush she could feel spreading so hotly across her face. She focused on scratching Bull’s ear again.

“Don’t go hurting my poor dog now.”

“Why would you even ask that?” She demanded.

“I dunno, you were staring for a while.” Kakashi took another drag of his cigarette.

“That’s because it’s a rare sight seeing you without a mask.” Sakura said. “It’s like when a zoo animal finally comes out of its cave.”

“Ah,” was all Kakshi said. And then, “So, who’s the better looking one?” He propped an elbow and knee and rested his cheek on a hand, considering her with open amusement.

But this time, Sakura refused to be caught off guard. “You know,” Sakura said as she slowly sat up and began to extricate herself from out of beneath the Pitbull, but the giant dog was not inclined to let his free-scratches get away so easily. “You talk more without the mask.”

Kakashi didn’t respond.

“Are you trying to make a point?” she finally asked.

Kakashi shrugged, but the man didn’t have his mask, so Sakura could see his damn smile. Her teacher, she was beginning to realized, was kind of a dick.

“You’re kind of a jerk, aren’t you, Sensei?” It was more of a statement than a question. She pulled her arm out of Bull’s mouth. He grumbled sulkily. 

“I’m the Hokage, Sakura, it comes with the territory,” Kakashi replied glibly. “Sometimes you gotta kiss the baby, and sometimes you gotta send out kids to go kill the guys on your shit list.”

“And sometimes you double the Weather Department’s budget?”

“Exactly.”

“You know what? I think I liked you better with your mask on.”

“Ah, So I _am_ , better looking than Sasuke,” he deduced, smiling to himself as kept his eyes straight ahead while she slipped back into her dress.

“No, you’re not. Sasuke-kun is way better looking than you, and he’s not a complete dick about it.”

Kakashi grounded his cigarette into the soil and flicked the butt away. “Hmm, somehow I doubt that,” he said. Before Sakura could give him her manifesto on the Uchiha, Kakashi tugged up his mask and rose to his feet. “ Oh look, sounds like the rain’s stopping. I suppose we can resume the mission now,” he said. He tossed Bull a treat from one of the many pockets in his vest before dismissing the hulking beast. 

“What? No it’s not! It’s still pouring out there! You can’t just say something like that run away from this conversation, Kakashi-sensei!” Sakura fumed, but it was too late: Kakashi’s mask was already back in place and he probably wouldn’t pull down again for a very long time.

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. Whoa. Did Kakashi and Sakura just bang without actually banging? I’m not too sure either lol. Seriously, I don't know half the time how I get to the end of these stories. This was supposed to end with Kakashi being like “yo, cool right forgot u knew about my nicotine habit.” And then he’s supposed to pull down his mask and that was it, and then I was like “oh, well, what happens if we take this scene one more step?” And then the man just swerves and turns into a mouthy jerk. Yes, this is literally how my brain works. I have zero control sometimes, for better or for worse.  
> 3\. You're right! There are one or two recycled images/ motifs from Collision Course since I wrote these pretty much at the same time.  
> 4\. This story started with a thought I had while running, where my brain was like, "you know, Kakashi is totally the type of guy who'd smoke a cigarette." And I was like "Shut up, you're right." And it was supposed to be a drabble piece, and then (like most things in my life) spun wildly out of my control.


End file.
